Instead of injection molding, or die-casting, or even digitally controlled lathe and milling machines where the mold or template for each part must be designed and built individually (and often by hand); one machine (the printer) can be programmed to manufacture many different types of parts and components. The idea is to replace all manual (and most mental) labor with skills that can be executed through software, through a graphical user interface. And once the procedure is coded up, an infinite number of copies of the procedure can be made, and sent over data links anywhere in the world, where they can run on any device. I saw it happen first hand in cartography. And it happened very quickly.

Its awfully hard to be critical of this trend without sounding like a Luddite, someone who wants to preserve the Old Ways of doing things at all costs, no matter how inefficient and expensive, just so industrial workers can make good salaries after they learn complex skills. There are very good reasons why technology should be applied in this way to manufacturing, and now, to many management and administrative tasks as well. (It ain't just machinists and draftsmen who will be thrown out of work, a lot of suits in the front office are going to suddenly find themselves redundant. There goes the middle class.)

But let's face it, we can't ALL be programmers or software developers and operators, or the PHD specialists they support, the ones who spec out their programs. The whole economic point of all these technologies is the need to reduce labor costs, which are now the most expensive part of all industrial processes.

The final step of this evolution is a society where a very few highly specialized people will be able to provide all the labor required to produce and manage everything everyone needs. It will be a society made up mostly of non-contributing people or manual worker drones. If nothing else, it will be a colossal waste of talent and creativity.

What is everyone else going to do, and how will the average man earn the resources he needs to buy the goods and services that are produced by the society? Its the lesson the Romans learned the hard way--the more slaves you integrate into your economy, the greater a problem you have with unemployment.

And I don't mean to imply that this is all merely a Capitalist plot designed to impoverish us all so the rich can live like Pharaoh. (Although that certainly plays a role!) Its a lot more complex, subtle, and insidious than that. What I'm saying is that economic forces are driving technological development in a direction that will inevitably cause social problems. Its not a conspiracy, its a process, much like digestion.

We've been through similar crises in our history as a species before, and these problems have eventually been solved, but too often the cost has been staggering, and it has always fallen disproportionately on the shoulders of those least able to pay.